Tuesday, April 25, 2023

Had to get there before the snowmelt started and you have to worry about flash floods

Finally did some hiking in the Alabama Hills.

 


 That's the east side of Mount Whitney. The estimates I've heard have the melt continuing into June. Even as far south as the San Gabriels, I'm still seeing a surprising amount of snow on the mountains.

It has been an extraordinary year.

(back to very serious blogging tomorrow.)

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Monday, April 24, 2023

Ponderings about ancient Rome

This is Joseph.

So I love analogies with ancient Rome and I love the works of Bret Devereaux, an academic famous for making it clear to me how shallow my understanding of ancient history really is. But I worry about this particular quote:


I think that this must apply to Augustus (also named Julius Caesar because, of course he is) as the original Gaius Julius Caesar was a dictator but did not reign in any real sense of the word. At the time I suspect Augustus would have quibbled with the word "reign" but in retrospect I think we can allow that it was probably an accurate description of his power and influence. 

But what I think Augustus was worried about was an underproduction of elites and not a general decline in population. Both population and population density increase between 14 CE and 164 CE. Rome had a higher fertility than China, which is not evidence of a serious problem. 

In the modern west, I think we have the opposite problem in elite overproduction. That sounds like a oxymoron, but if elite training takes decades and there are insufficient opportunities at the end, people sacrifice decades of income and life for poor outcomes. Look at the issues with academics in the arts. It is a big source of discontent to have people train for ~10 years to end up needing to find a new life plan or to be trapped as adjuncts. 

There are defenders of this system, although notably the defender is from the UK where PhDs are 3 years long and so the opportunity cost is a lot less. It'd also be different if PhD was a job, itself, and not extensive and rigorous training for a job. I will also point out that most people doing a PhD work very hard -- so it is extensive effort for a goal and not necessarily a time of leisure that would make the low salary seem like a good plan. Nor is there a general sense that elites have few children in the US (Elon Musk famously has ten. Donald Trump has five. Joe Biden has four. Bill Gates has three. I don't see a fertility crisis among the elite. 

So I guess I am not certain of the truth, but I do think that shallow analogies are potentially dangerous and could push us in the wrong direction. The fertility challenge for the modern world is the middle class, and I would look squarely at long training phases, expensive housing, and limited childcare if I wanted to confront that. 

Oh, and spoiler alert. Augustus was a long, long way from the fall of Rome. Augustus dies in 14 CE, The Western Roman Empire goes through a golden age for a couple of centuries and lasts until 476 CE. The final fall of the actual Roman Empire takes place in 1453 CE, not precisely an indication of imminent disaster during the time of Augustus. 




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Friday, April 21, 2023

Weekend Movies -- the all time great winter Western noir (plus a bonus flick)

You can still see some snow in the mountains, but the days are getting hot and it won't be there long. The passing of the season got me thinking about one of my favorite winter films, André de Toth's sadly under-recognized Day of the Outlaw featuring Robert Ryan and Burl Ives at the top of their games, with strong support by Tina Louise (who really should be remembered for more than that TV show). Unforgettable last half hour.

It's available free with ads from Pluto.




No snow but a lot of rain in James Whale's The Old Dark House, so I don't have a seasonal excuse for talking about it here, but it was a virtually lost film for decades. It's finally back in circulation, showing up on Svengoolie (who had been trying to get it for ten or twenty years) and on streaming services like the also free with ads Tubi.

Does The Old Dark House live up to expectations? No, but it's difficult to see how it could. Not only does it face the build-up that comes with decades of being a film everyone talked about but nobody saw; it also has to stand up to Whale's other horror films of the era, Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, and the Invisible Man.
 

Still, taken on its own, it stands up quite well, I'm glad I finally got to check it off my list.





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Thursday, April 20, 2023

Thursday Tweets -- that hollow thump you're hearing is the sound of a narrative imploding

And the hits just keep on coming.

While there's no question Ron DeSantis is having a cruel April, his apparent collapse has less to do with recent developments and more to do with people finally acknowledging how flimsy the original narrative was, a product of motivated reasoning and wishful analytics (which a lot of us called out at the time).

Republicans were looking (as they have been since 2015) for a way to lose Trump and hold onto his supporters. The establishment press (particularly the NYT) was looking for a GOP candidate whom it could cover without embarrassment, perhaps even one they could both-sides without inviting mockery. These strange bedfellows all convinced themselves that DeSantis was the savior they were seeking. 

I can't think of any candidate who received a comparable build-up starting not just before the election but years before the campaign. The idea Trump was basically done and Ron was all but a sure thing became a foundational assumption of the standard narrative. If the pundit class had any capacity for self-awareness, they'd be having a rough April too.

None of which is to say that DeSantis won't get the nomination -- Trump is a spectacularly self-destructive old man with a terribly unhealthy lifestyle and Ron is still next in line -- but the most likely path to the nomination looks nothing like what expert opinion was telling us a few months ago.





Another bit of bad luck for DeSantis came when Disney fired the stupidest CEO in the Fortune 500. With Chapek, Ron could come off as a Trump-style bully (red meat for the base). Now Disney is slapping him around and his response is petulant and weak.




And in other GOP news...



“I was reading a sign high on the wall behind the bar: ONLY GENUINE PRE-WAR AMERICAN AND BRITISH WHISKEYS SERVED HERE I was trying to count how many lies could be found in those nine words, and had reached four, with promise of more...” ― Dashiell Hammett



 

And they call us Arkansans poor white trash.







When defending the indefensible, always start with positive framing (also useful for access journalism).



Remember when Republicans disliked Russian stooges?





 

 Musk/Tesla/Twitter



 

Elon has always been best understood as the sophomore who keeps coming by the freshmen dorm rooms because he can bum their weed and impress them with deep thoughts from the philosophy class he audited.




Nice to find someone who's read the classics.
Speaking of things they should have seen coming.


Step 1: Have a rich daddy.

Swifter than most.


When bad things happen to stupid, annoying people.

 

Back in my teaching days, my classroom was always the one with the chess boards. I feel vindicated.


In AI news...



And for the math nerds in the audience.
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Wednesday, April 19, 2023

Critiquing my own side

This is Joseph.

Sometimes it can be healthy to point out places where your political party falls short. Smart self-reflection is the basis for positive change, after all. So lets talk about the senate and entitlement. Hopefully this is a retrospective, set for being published in the future, and the events discussed are over by now.

The Democrats have the president and 51 senators. One of them has been in the hospital for depression for 44 days. One of them came down with Shingles in February and does not have a return date in mid-April.  Two others are Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, meaning that they both now hold the ability to defect and give the opposition a majority, just by not voting. 

Now I think the insane push to put democrat aligned judges on the bench is playing into the Republican supreme court gambit, but I recognize that there is a lack of consensus on better ideas, Why there is this lack of consensus is fair enough -- a diverse party will struggle with organization and strategy. 

"I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat." -- Will Rogers

So execution of strategy is important. The senator with shingles is on the judiciary committee, so her absence blocks forward progress. The Republicans have blocked a measure to substitute her out. She is 89 years old and is within 18 months of leaving the senate. 

So far, so good. What scares me is the defense of this process. See here. See more from Talking Points Memo here:
Senate Dems Look Moronic 
The most generous interpretation of Senate Democrats’ ineffectual effort to get Republicans to help them sideline Dianne Feinstein so they can resume confirming Biden judges is that they needed to go through these motions and have them fail before they could prevail on Feinstein to resign her seat.

I could barely type that without screaming into the void. Because of course that’s too generous by a lot.

Senate Republicans lined up yesterday to declare they’re not going to lend Democrats a hand. Of course not. It was silly to pretend they were going to help, both because this is the modern Republican Party and because … why should they really?

So we’re back to where this all started a week or so ago. Until DiFi resigns her seat, the Judiciary Committee is hamstrung and new Biden judicial nominations will be stalled. It’s true that Senate Democrats can’t make her resign, but the song-and-dance routine of the past week doesn’t inspire confidence that they really get what’s at stake or have coalesced around an effective path forward.

But this defense is shocking: "They all deserve a chance to get better and come back to work. Dianne will get better. She will come back to work.” To quote Unforgiven: "Deserve's got nothin' to do with it."

We saw the same issue with Ruth Bader Ginsburg who stayed until the very end and switched the median vote on the supreme court from John Roberts to Bret Kavanaugh. People talked about how tragic it was that she was participating in the court from a hospital room, ignoring that it was her decision to stay in office during the preceding 8 year democratic presidency. 

The role of an elected official is to represent their people and to advocate for them. Elite offices are not a prize to be won but they are a solemn responsibility to the constituents to be an effective advocate and representative. It is the office that has respect and not at all the person in the office.

I think we should look at these issues through this lens -- how do we ensure that people are properly represented. I think it is obvious that allowing the judiciary to keep being stacked when one side is in power but not the other is a poor strategy and likely to cause issues in the long run. 

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Tuesday, April 18, 2023

Progressive journalists and bloggers are unified behind the need to champion reproductive rights, protect democrat institutions, and loosen fire safety laws

I HAVE NO POSITION ON THE SINGLE STAIRWAY QUESTION.

I HAVE NO POSITION ON THE SINGLE STAIRWAY QUESTION.

I HAVE NO POSITION ON THE SINGLE STAIRWAY QUESTION.  

I HAVE NO POSITION ON THE SINGLE STAIRWAY QUESTION.

I HAVE NO POSITION ON THE SINGLE STAIRWAY QUESTION.

I HAVE NO POSITION ON THE SINGLE STAIRWAY QUESTION.

 

I apologize for the caps and the repetition, but given the state of the discourse, I was afraid that anything less emphatic would let us sink back into the mire. This is a post about the dysfunctional discussion, not about the underlying questions. It is entirely possible that our current fire safety laws around building access are onerous and that a good cost-benefit would find that we should phase some of them out. I can't comment on that because I haven't seen a good overview of the data and consensus expert opinion on the subject.  Unfortunately, neither have any of the other people who learned about the matter from a spate of articles from Slate, Lawyers, Guns and Money, New York Magazine, Slow Boring (Matt Yglesias), etc.

Instead, we get something like this from Eric Levitz.

Thus, the two-stair model comes with considerable architectural and economic costs. And it’s far from clear that multiple stairways meaningfully increase fire safety. Many European nations where single-stair designs are dominant have lower rates of fires than the U.S. Mandating sprinkler systems and other low-cost fire precautions would likely compensate for any diminution in safety resulting from a switch to a single-stair standard.

We get a couple of weaselly phrases like "far from clear" and "would likely compensate," and a standard other-countries-do-this-and-they're-fine arguments not dissimilar in form to the claims that smoking reduces heart disease in France (which is once again -- don't make me bring out the caps lock -- not to say that the comparison here is invalid, just that you have to be really careful with this kind of causal reasoning). It's also worth noting that the single link included doesn't point to actual data on the subject.

The closest I've seen to an actual discussion of the safety issues is from this widely cited Slate piece by Henry Grabar.

The specter of big structure fires—like the fire at London’s Grenfell Tower, the single-stair housing project whose defective façade panels caught fire in 2017, killing 71 people—is what reformers like Eliason and Speckert are up against. But building fires are much less common than they were when single-stair rules were codified, to the extent that most city dwellers roll their eyes at office fire drills and curse their hyperactive apartment smoke alarms. Data from the World Fire Statistics Centre show Canada, for example, has little to show for its two-story limit.

Putting aside the people complain about fire drills and smoke alarms so fire danger is not that big a deal (how many safety measures do people not complain about?), Grabar does link to actual data, which would be an improvement except for a few things: I get a 404 when I click on the link; it refers to Canada housing which is a highly problematic outlier (hell, I'm a YIMBY when it comes to Canada); the link isn't to the World Fire Statistics Centre. Instead it goes to the site of Speckert who seems to have built his career around advocating for this one issue and who presumably is picking data points that support his position; You might get the impression that the organization that puts out this data is on the same page as Grabar.

On that last point. I'm not sure which center/centre we're talking about (Speckert's site isn't much help). It could be this apparently dormant report from the Geneva Association, an insurance industry group, or it could be from the International Technical Committee for the Prevention and Extinction of Fire (French: Comité Technique International de Prévention et d'Extinction du Feu - CTIF). GA doesn't appear to have said anything about the single stairway question but CTIF has, and if you search their site, here's what you'll find.

One single staircase for a 570 feet building 

Concerns are recently rising in the UK about high rise and mid rise building safety in general, and it has been suggested rescue staircases should be designed differently based on what happened in the Grenfell Tower fire. Since an extra staircase would take away space which could be monetized as residential areas, it is thought that developers are resisting putting in an extra staircase, despite safety concerns.

The UK building code only requires one single staircase, even for a building as high as the Cuba Street Tower.

The international building code however - which is adopted by many countries and US states but not the UK - requires that, residential blocks need to be built with at least two staircases if the building is taller than four storeys.

One of the main safety concerns is that residents would need to use the same staircase as the firefighters would be using during a fire - which could lead to smoke inhalation for the residents trying to exit the building.

In an article in The Guardian on January 10, 2022,  UK fire experts criticized the design of the Cuba Street Tower, a new 51 storey apartment high rise close to Canary Wharf in London.  The apartment tower is planned to house more than 420 apartments and more than 650 bedrooms. 

 

London Fire Brigades writes Letter of Concern re: single staircase in a new 173 meter building

Despite that all apartments in the Cuba Street project above 11 meters are planned to be equipped with sprinklers, fire safety experts feel evacuations may still be needed in case of a fire.

An article in the Daily Mail, claimed on January 13 that the 428-flat tower block will be one of the tallest residential buildings in the UK. It will be 570 feet (173 meters) which is more than two-and-a-half times the height of Grenfell Tower. 

According to the same Daily Mail article, the London Fire Brigades have serious concerns about the single staircase and has addressed the city in a Letter of Concern:

"... We do not believe that sufficient justification has been provided for the tall single stair approach, nor do we agree that particular aspects of the design are compatible for such an approach. Furthermore, in our opinion there are insufficient facilities provided to support the safe egress for disabled occupants...".   

Arnold Tarling, a chartered surveyor and fire safety expert, said in the Guardian article: “It is utter madness that this is still allowed.”

Tarling allegedly has recently inspected a newly built apartment tower in the same area of London and discovered serious failings that would mean residents might not be safe to stay in their flats in a fire. 

He then referenced the recent deadly Bronx fire, where many casualties could have been avoided had fire escapes been installed in the building.  The worst-case of having only a single staircase would be  “another Bronx fire, another Grenfell, or another Lakanal type fire”, he said.

 Despite the impression you'd get from Slate, LGM, New York Magazine, Slow Boring, and pretty much every pundit who weighs in here, the safety of these proposals is still very much up for debate and actual fire fighters have landed firmly on the worried side.

The entire housing discussion- - if we can even call it that (discussion implies an exchange of ideas)-- has become so overwrought and distorted that it no longer even vaguely reflects the actual questions that need to be discussed. In this case we have a dispute between developers and architects on one hand and fire safety experts in First Responders on the other over the issue of safety regulations. It is enormously telling that Grabar without supporting arguments or even comment puts the reformers on the side of the first group. Historically, this is not the way this breaks.

None of this is to say, or even to suggest, that the single stairway people are wrong. There are any number of examples of excessive and onerous regulations with unexpected consequences that need to be revised or removed entirely. In case you missed the first six lines of my post, I don't have a position on that, but I do know that what we're getting from the pundits is not helping us make an informed decision.

 For an example of a much better example of an argument for fewer safety regulations, I send you to Mitchell and Webb.


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Monday, April 17, 2023

Twelve years ago at the blog -- game nerds taking it to eleven

Friday, April 29, 2011

Weekend Gaming -- perfecting the imperfect

[disclaimer -- I've only field tested the first of these, so I can't guarantee that all of the variations will play smoothly. On the bright side, there ought to be plenty of room for improvement. As with all discussions of game variants, you should probably assume that countless people have already come up with any idea presented here.]

When the subject of perfect information games comes up, you probably think of chess, checkers, go, possibly Othello/Reversi and, if you're really into board games, something obscure like Agon. When you think of games of imperfect information, the first things that come to mind are probably probably card games like poker or a board game with dice-determined moves like backgammon and, if you're of a nostalgic bent, dominoes.

We can always make a perfect game imperfect by adding a random element or some other form of hidden information. In the chess variant Kriegspiel, you don't know where your opponent's pieces are until you bump into them. The game was originally played with three boards and a referee but the advent of personal computing has greatly simplified the process.

For a less elaborate version of imperfect chess, try adding a die-roll condition to certain moves. For example, if you attempt to capture and roll a four or better, the capture is allowed, if you roll a two or a three, you return the pieces to were they were before the capture (in essence losing a turn) and if you roll a one, you lose the attacking piece. Even a fairly simple variant such as this can raise interesting strategic questions.

But what about going the other way? Can we modify the rules of familiar games of chance so that they become games of perfect information? As far as I can tell the answer is yes, usually by making them games of resource allocation.

I first tried playing around with perfecting games because I'd started playing dominoes with a bluesman friend of mine (which is a bit like playing cards with a man named Doc). In an attempt to level the odds, I suggested playing the game with all the dominoes face up. We would take turns picking the dominoes we wanted until all were selected then would play the game using the regular rules. (We didn't bother with scoring -- whoever went out first won -- but if you want a more traditional system of scoring, you'd probably want to base it on the number of dominoes left in the loser's hand)

I learned two things from this experiment: first, a bluesman can beat you at dominoes no matter how you jigger the rules; and second, dominoes with perfect information plays a great deal like the standard version.

Sadly dominoes is not played as widely as it once was but you can try something similar with dice games like backgammon. Here's one version.

Print the following repeatedly on a sheet of paper:

Each player gets as many sheets as needed. When it's your turn you choose a number, cross it out of the inverted pyramid then move your piece that many spaces. Once you've crossed out a number you can't use it again until you've crossed out all of the other numbers in the pyramid. Obviously this means you'll want to avoid situations like having a large number of pieces two or three spaces from home.

If and when you cross off all of the numbers in one pyramid you start on the next. There's no limit to the number of pyramids you can go through. Other than that the rules are basically the same as those of regular backgammon except for a couple of modifications:

You can't land on the penultimate triangle (you'd need a one to get home and there are no ones in this variant);

If all your possible moves are blocked, you get to cross off two numbers instead of one (this discourages overly defensive play).

I haven't had a chance to field test this one, but it should be playable and serve as at least a starting point (let me know if you come up with something better). The same inverted pyramid sheet should be suitable for other dice based board games like parcheesi and maybe even Monopoly (though I'd have to give that one some thought).

I had meant to close with a perfected variant of poker but working out the rules is taking a bit longer than I expected. Maybe next week.

In the meantime, any ideas, improvement, additions?

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Friday, April 14, 2023

Watching ChatGPT explain a reasoning problem is like watching someone who learned the language phonetically take an improv class

When trying to keep your head above the hype and bullshit surrounding large language models, here's a handy trick. Ask yourself how many people have answered exactly the same question in print over the years. If the answer is a large number, it would not be surprising if the LLM approach of looking at the likelihood of certain words and phrases appearing with other words and phrases actually produced something that seemed to show comprehension and awareness. 

For example, if you asked ChatGPT to prove some familiar theorem, there's a good chance that the algorithm would stitch together an acceptable answer out of the thousands of explanations out there. 

 


It may look impressive, but it no more demonstrates an understanding of mathematics than reciting a passage from Goethe learned phonetically demonstrates a mastery of German grammar and syntax.

Here's what it looks like when an LLM encounters a new problem.







It is not just that the answer is wrong or that the explanation is wrong; it's that they seem unaware not just of the problem, but of each other. The answer at the top is different than the answer at the bottom and neither matches the steps given. 

We need to start thinking of these systems not as generative AI but as regurgative. In some cases that's good enough, niche applications like generating unimportant boilerplate text or writing code snippets, but even in those limited area, it can only function where humans have not only explored a question, but have done so in such exhaustive detail that the algorithm can autocomplete its way to a useful response.

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Thursday, April 13, 2023

Thursday Tweets -- you can skip all the snarky stuff after the first tweet, but you have to watch this segment on the Tennessee legislature

This has been building for years.

 This one is sleazy in a particularly telling way.




And keep an eye on this part of the story.

More fun with Ron and Don




And humiliated him. Don't leave that out. 

Most historians say droit du seigneur was a myth, but for this Mar-a-Lago visitor...


You know what's fun in a schadenfreude sorta way? Remembering all the wise pundits downplaying the impact of Dobbs. 


 

 In a shocking development, John Yoo was able to justify Clarence Thomas's behavior.




And while on the subject of Nazis.


 Watching these people convince themselves that Joe Biden is a wild-eyed leftist is still amusing more than two years in.

 
For those on the left still supporting Russia in the name of anti-imperialism.

Checking in with Elon




 

 On a related note, getting people to stop driving vehicles that are way bigger than they need would probably do more than any recent proposal pushing EVs.

 

This week in AI hype.



 

And finally a visit to the nerd corner.










And for the Mad fans who are code nerds.

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Wednesday, April 12, 2023

Twelve years ago at the blog -- {2,2,4,4,9,9}, {1,1,6,6,8,8}, {3,3,5,5,7,7}

Warren Buffett had a set of non-transitive that he used to challenge people's intuitions about probability. He once challenged Bill Gates to a game. Gates looked at the dice and said, "sure, you go first."

Monday, April 18, 2011

Cheap Beer, Paradoxical Dice, and the Unfounded Morality of Economists

Sometimes a concept can be so intuitively obvious that it actually becomes more difficult to teach and discuss. Take transitivity. We say that real numbers have the transitive property. That means that if you have three real numbers (A, B and C) and you know A > B and B > C then you also know that A > C.

Transitivity is just too obvious to get your head around. In order to think about a concept you really have to think about its opposite as well --

A > B, B > C and C > A. None too imaginatively, we call these opposite relationships intransitive or non-transitive. Non-transitive relationships are deeply counter-intuitive. We just don't expect the world to work like that. If you like butterscotch shakes better than chocolate shakes and chocolate shakes better than vanilla shakes, you expect to like butterscotch better than vanilla. If you can beat me at chess and I can beat Harry, you assume you can beat Harry. There is. of course, an element of variability here -- Harry might be having a good day or you might be in a vanilla kind of mood -- but on average we expect these relationships to hold.

The only example of a non-transitive relationship most people can think of is the game Rock, Paper, Scissors. Other games with non-transitive elements include the boomer classic Stratego where the highest ranked piece can only be captured by the lowest and my contribution, the game Kruzno which was designed specifically to give students a chance to work with these concepts.

While these games give us a chance to play around with non-transitive relationships, they don't tell us anything about how these relationships might arise in the real world. To answer that question, it's useful to look at another game.

Here are the rules. We have three dice marked as follows:

Die A {2,2,4,4,9,9}

Die B {1,1,6,6,8,8}

Die C {3,3,5,5,7,7}

Because I'm a nice guy, I'm going to let you pick the die you want. I'll then take one of the two remaining dice. We'll roll and whoever gets the higher number wins. Which die should you pick?

The surprising answer is that no matter which one you pick I'll still have the advantage because these are non-transitive dice. A beats B five out of nine times. B beats C five out of nine times. C beats A five out of nine times. The player who chooses second can always have better odds.

The dice example shows that it's possible for systems using random variables to result in non-transitive relationships. Can we still get these relationships in something deterministic like the rules of a control system or perhaps the algorithm a customer might use to decide on a product?

One way of dealing with multiple variables in a decision is to apply a threshold test to one variable while optimizing another. Here's how you might use this approach to decide between two six-packs of beer: if the price difference is a dollar or less, buy the better brand; otherwise pick the cheaper one.* For example, let's say that if beer were free you would rank beers in this order:

1. Sam Adams

2. Tecate

3. Budweiser

If these three beers cost $7.99, $6.99 and $5.99 respectively, you would pick Tecate over Bud, Sam Adams over Tecate and Bud over Sam Adams. In other words, a rock/paper/scissors relationship.

Admittedly, this example is a bit contrived but the idea of a customer having a threshold price is not outlandish, and there are precedents for the idea of a decision process where one variable is ignored as long as it stays within a certain range.

Of course, we haven't established the existence, let alone the prevalence of these relationships in economics but their very possibility raises some interesting questions and implications. Because transitivity is such an intuitively appealing concept, it often works its way unnoticed into the assumptions behind all sorts of arguments. If you've shown A is greater than B and B is greater than C, it's natural not to bother with A and C.

What's worse, as Edward Glaeser has observed, economists tend to be reductionists, and non-transitivity tends to play hell with reductionism. This makes economics particularly dependent on assumptions of transitivity. Take Glaeser's widely-cited proposal for a "moral heart of economics":

Teachers of first-year graduate courses in economic theory, like me, often begin by discussing the assumption that individuals can rank their preferred outcomes. We then propose a measure — a ranking mechanism called a utility function — that follows people’s preferences.

If there were 1,000 outcomes, an equivalent utility function could be defined by giving the most favored outcome a value of 1,000, the second best outcome a value of 999 and so forth. This “utility function” has nothing to do with happiness or self-satisfaction; it’s just a mathematical convenience for ranking people’s choices.

But then we turn to welfare, and that’s where we make our great leap.

Improvements in welfare occur when there are improvements in utility, and those occur only when an individual gets an option that wasn’t previously available. We typically prove that someone’s welfare has increased when the person has an increased set of choices.

When we make that assumption (which is hotly contested by some people, especially psychologists), we essentially assume that the fundamental objective of public policy is to increase freedom of choice.


But if these rankings can be non-transitive, then you run into all sorts of problems with the very idea of a utility function. (It would also seem to raise some interesting questions about revealed preference.) Does that actually change the moral calculus? Perhaps not but it certainly complicates things (what exactly does it mean to improve someone's choices when you don't have a well-ordered set?). More importantly, it raises questions about the other assumptions lurking in the shadows here. What if new options affect the previous ones in some other way? For example, what if the value of new options diminishes as options accumulate?

It's not difficult to argue for the assumption that additional choices bring diminishing returns. After all, the more choices you have, the less likely you are to choose the new one. This would imply that any action that takes choices from someone who has many and gives them to someone has significantly fewer represents a net gain since the choice is more likely to be used by the recipient. Let's say we weight the value of a choice by the likelihood of it being used, and if we further assume that giving someone money increases his or her choices, then taking money from a rich person and giving it to a poor person should produce a net gain in freedom.

Does this mean Glaeser's libertarian argument is secretly socialist? Of course not. The fact that he explicitly cites utility functions suggests that he is talking about a world where orders are well defined, and effects are additive and you can understand the whole by looking at the parts. In that world his argument is perfectly valid.

But as we've just seen with our dice and our beer, we can't always trust even the most intuitively obvious assumptions to hold. What's more, our examples were incredibly simple. The distribution of each die just had three equally probable values. The purchasing algorithm only used two variables and two extremely straightforward rules.

The real world is far more complex. With more variables and more involved rules and relationships, the chances of an assumption catching us off guard only get greater.



*Some economists might object at this point that this algorithm is not rational in the strict economics sense of the word. That's true, but unless those economists are also prepared to argue that all consumers are always completely rational actors, the argument still stands.

 

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Tuesday, April 11, 2023

Canada's growth

This is Joseph

There is a long conversation right now on whether Canada is broken or if Canada is not a serious country. I was talking about this with Mark and he was skeptical so I decided to lay out the numbers. One item in evidence is long term GDP change compared to the USA and Australia.

Here are some numbers: 

Canada (Year, GDP,  GDP per capita, population)

1990 $593.93B $21,448      28,347,641

2021 $1,988.34B $51,988      38,155,012


Australia (Year, GDP,  GDP per capita, population)

1990 $311.43B     $18,250    17,048,003

2021 $1,552.67B     $60,443    25,921,089


USA (Year, GDP,  GDP per capita, population)

1990 $5,963.14B $23,889    248,083,732

2021 $23,315.08B $70,249    336,997,624


The striking comparison over the past 30 years is Australia. Australia had a 52% increase in population and managed to jump ahead in per capita income despite being behind when I graduated high school. Yes, in the old days when the mighty cave person hunted the fierce dinosaur, Canadians were richer than Australians. 

Australia went from 52% of the GDP of Canada to 78% of the GDP of Canada over the next 31 years. Canada grew 35% in population, an easier pace to sustain, and still managed to have slower growth in both total and per capita GDP. The ability to boost per capita GDP at the same time as rapid population growth is a really neat trick if you can manage it. 

The USA isn't a great comparator, either. At the start of this time period the USA was 11% richer per capita, while at the end it was 35% richer per capita. US GDP grew 391% despite the same % population growth as Canada, while Canada managed 335%. That gap is the source of the growing divide in per capita income.

More recently, it looks like Canada is adopting a high immigration strategy. Canada's strategy looks a lot like the Australian plan. Obviously the Australians are doing something right and it would be smart to emulate them. But the worry is that we are slowly losing ground and that speeding up immigration in a time of relative decline compared to peer nations makes it harder to build social consensus. A brisk relative increase in wealth is a great way to sustain public support for high immigration  -- people enjoy becoming more affluent. It remains to be see if Canada can turn this sluggish growth trajectory around and make this new plan work.

That's the real test as to whether we are still functional.  

P.S. The best follow-up to the broken versus serious is here. The inspiration is here. 

The inspiration included New Zealand which seems designed to make Canadians sad with 550% growth in GDP over the same time period and an increase from 64% of Canada's per capita GDP to 94% with similar population growth to Australia:

New Zealand (Year, GDP,  GDP per capita, population)

1990 $45.50B         $13,663        5,129,727

2021 $249.89B $48,781        3,397,389

The huge immigration surge of the late Trudeau administration (really the last few years) has not really led to the sort of boom that the pacific part of the Anglosphere are experiencing. The UK is hard because of Brexit. 

Another interesting factor is child-bearing. Canada's most recent year (2020) is 1.4 children per woman despite a large immigrant population. In contrast, it's peers are all 1.6 (Australia, NZ, and the US). So it has to struggle harder against the demographic headwinds. Canada is closer to Japan (1.3) than to the US (1.6). 

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Monday, April 10, 2023

"I'm Dreaming of a White Easter"



I went up to the Sierras this weekend and finally checked snowshoeing off my to-do list. It absolutely kicked my ass -- trudging through deep snow, often using muscles that hadn't seen any action in forever, all at around 7,500 feet (not the highest peak around here but high enough). Saturday was beautiful and the views were stunning and I'm looking forward to getting an earlier start next season.

As always, California is a study in contrasts. The cottage I rented was four hours from LA, and the drive through the Central Valley was warm and sunny. It's supposed to hit 90 degrees in Bakersfield today, but you'll still be able to see snow covered slopes from the 99 for at least a few more days.

The concern now is the coming snow melt and the risk of more floods, particularly in the Valley, but we are still very grateful for a break in the drought. Not to minimize the dangers, but in the West, too much water is almost always better than too little.

And wet winters bring superblooms.


























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